/lane fields

Unmade

I am a palimpsest: leather -bound body with its edits & erasures visible;

marginalia, withered words seen & unseen; failure scars my fortune, blossom

of mauve stretchmarks, hips no children will widen; god, even my bones ache

to be—to be—to be; altered beasts of becoming, banned shapes; sex changes

a person, the first questions we ask ourselves—glances between our legs &

cupping our chests in search of Adam, a knife in the torso to extract Eve within

us; I am not saying god made a mistake I am only saying he made my body a fault

line when I was a cell dividing myself in half—when I was a gamete/soldier/asylee/

engine/abomination/girl/boy/ twinkle-in-my-father’s-eye— when I was nothing,

I was perfect, two small hands clasped in prayer, just waiting to become unmade—

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Floodtown

The collective heart is buried in unsown fields: trampled on & tilled with shit, sludge of night soil mixed with futile earth.

Beyond the empty fields is a river. Stillborn river, its banks overgrown with blue & violet phlox, changes everything around it. It rushes

ahead of itself around bends, carves meaning into the land, gives itself away to the laboring doe as she lies down to set free twin fawns. But the river

is a gentle tyrant. Torrents spilling over its borders in the storms of late spring, it surges and saturates the barren ground. The fields turn septic, our dreams encased

in filth. Our waiting makes us bitter, dark. We ache to burst through, a single seed. The river was our first love, but now we are at the mercy of the rain.

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Lane Fields is a queer, trans poet living in Boston and a student of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Lane’s poetry has appeared in places such as Hobart, Yemassee, Interim, and Tupelo Press’s 30/30 Project. You can follow Lane on Instagram at @lane.fields or Twitter at @ohwowitslane.